That Paradox Explained

I've realised that I never fully explained the paradox I referred to here.

It's the paradox of being liberated and depressed by the same idea.

And so, when LM told me that he had Grand Ideas concerning the motivation of students like The Addams Family, and hoped to learn if they could be dealt with by such learner-empowering tools as Virtual Learning Environments, only to get here and find that he would struggle to provide a book, never mind a VLE. Well, I thought, yes indeedy. I too liked the look of this project, the originality and innovation it involved.

And like LM I got here to find... same old baloney as every other job: get bums on seats and keep them there as long as they're paying, never mind that they cannot be taught, and that they put serious obstacles in the way of their classmates learning too. Never mind. Cram the bastards for an exam, help them get a bit of paper, and move them onto the next level and the next bit of paper.

It IS depressing. Also, liberating. I'm used to this hypocrisy and can survive it.

Young Gomez was whining the other day, not without some justification, that I was trying to show him the trick involved in passing a certain part of the C&G exam. "But I am here to learn English, so I can teach in English."

Which would sound good if you didn't know him, and know that what he's really saying is, "this exam cramming is quite hard work, and I will be found out at the end of it if I don't do some serious studying. I want to go back to nice fluffy tefly things, all those games, where I can bullshit my way through."

Edited Class Notes IV

I’ve missed nearly two weeks of notes because of a sudden change in course. Briefly, the management decided that ALL students would undertake C&G examinations at the beginning of May. This means that our methodical plod through International Express was replaced by urgent trotting through the C&G achiever book – which isn’t a text really suitable for communicative learning, so I’ve been spending time adapting the materials for classroom use.

This week is testing week at the end of block one, so I also had a test to design.

And we’ve managed to move from the temporary-temporary classrooms to the temporary ones.

Yesterday we had testing. Today I’m having the students re-write work for their portfolios – which I should have had in place earlier, but am instituting this week.

A standard error correction was introduced last week, too. This morning, the students got their first work back marked according to the code. The new classroom is nice and big in the local style so we able to have a table at the back to do one-to-one error correction and discussion, whilst the rest of the class get on with other work. It’s all beginning to shape up nicely.

So much so that I think we can dispense with the unkind comical names now – a teacher’s self defence against a prima facie rather daunting class. We are all on-side now, as it were. However, I still need to maintain anonymity for blogging and academic purposes. And, I do not want to edit past entries because that would feel like dishonesty and would anyway mask a commonly used but little discussed psychological technique.

So from now on, Old Gomez is “Nouri”; Fester is Abu Hamza; Young Gomez is El Mansur; Pugsley is Farouk and Mustafa – always a kind man who didn’t need satirising – is still Mustafa. I’ll maintain those identities in the research I do for my MA.

Which brings me to the placement test. The difference in marks between candidates is tiny – about 3%. And the errors are all in the same area, (grammar – the present perfect and question forms). Which means that the teaching of those points has not succeeded.

Working through the corrections for the assignments it’s clear that Abu Hamza in particular needs to work on articles. And also basic concepts of sentence structure, (S>V>O), and tenses. It's interesting in that it raises some potentially big questions about communicative teaching: he would say that he never learned any grammar during his time in England, and the methodology employed was no doubt communicative. Is there the glimmer of a case here for overt grammar teaching for some learners, in some contexts?